President Donald Trump’s beloved Reflecting Pool liner — now peeling and cracked — won’t be fixed before Independence Day celebrations, according to the California company that supplied the waterproof coating.
That news will sink Trump’s wish to have the pool looking pristine for celebrations of the nation’s 250th birthday.
“It will not be before the celebrations, that’s for sure,” Francois Rivard, vice president of Rhino Linings, told POLITICO in an interview Monday. “It would be up to [the National Park Service] to tell you exactly when they plan … but it’s in a matter of weeks, not years.”
Trump said in a Truth Social post Sunday that “work will begin immediately on fixing the seriously vandalized Reflecting Pool.”
He added: “I just inspected it, and could only say to myself, and those gathered around me, WOW, who would do such a thing? SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE! We will fix it?”
Asked to comment on the timeline for repairs, a White House official said the administration is “working to assess the extent of the damaged areas and will make the repairs as quickly as possible.”
Trump said last month that pool renovations would be completed before July Fourth celebrations, which will culminate in more than 800,000 fireworks over the National Mall, some of which was to be staged around the Reflecting Pool.
“The whole place was a mess,” Trump told reporters last month. “And when it opens in a couple of weeks, long before July 4 — we want to have it for July 4 weekend, but it’ll be long before that — you will see something that’s really going to be beautiful.”
The pool remains leak-proof, as the stripping appears to be the outer blue layer that’s purely for aesthetics, Rivard said.
“Was it manual intervention that made those few places peel, or was that the chemical composition of what was in the water? We don’t know until we have further results at this point, but it is not problematic,” he said.
But larger fixes to the pool’s coating will likely occur immediately after the July Fourth celebrations, said Rivard. The National Park Service and Atlantic Industrial Coatings are working to get the algae under control and running tests to decipher the true case of the peeling coat, Rivard said.
National Park Service spokespeople did not respond to requests for comment on their plans.
Trump launched the pool’s latest overhaul with a boast in April that he would install a commercial-grade swimming pool liner as a bargain solution to clean it up. Atlantic Industrial Coatings, which received the $14.7 million contract, employed Rhino Linings to apply the liner last month.
Shortly after, an algae bloom spread across the massive, 340,000-square-foot pool’s surface, leaving it a sickly green.
After federal park managers began addressing the algae by vacuuming, scraping and treating the water with hydrogen peroxide, the liner itself began peeling away.
Law enforcement began arresting and ticketing people whom they accused of peeling away or picking at the liner over the weekend, including U.S. Olympian David Hearn, who told The Washington Post he was detained for hours. He denied removing or damaging any of the liner.
The Reflecting Pool has long been plagued by algae.
A massive 2012 overhaul of the pool — which had at that point sunk a full foot, according to the Trust for the National Mall — switched its water supply from the city to controlled intake from the Tidal Basin, with a filtration system, and converted the bottom of the pool from asphalt and tile to concrete. At the time of the 2012 renovation, the pool was leaking 500,000 of water per week, according to the trust.
Trump blamed the failing pool liner on vandalism, during an Oval Office meeting with reporters Monday. He asserted that a 350-foot slit in the liner must have been cut with a knife or a box cutter.
He also said someone may have put fertilizer in the water to create the algae bloom.
“I can’t help it if someone goes in with a knife and starts hacking it up,” he said. Asked for evidence of the claim, the president said, “You’ll see it in court.”
The president said that despite the damages, the pool is not leaking, but it will have to be drained for repairs.
